The Deconstruction of Gender Bias: Algerian Myths in The Light of Greek Mythology

Abstract

Mythical narratives mirrorvarious social manifestations embedded in language and manifested through individuals’ social realizations. These manifestations are exemplified in the narratives invokers summon to realize multiple social aims and functions. These narratives also determine individuals’ social statuses and affect their gender according to their summoning purposes.This work is the disjectamembra of hermeneutic and practical components.It scrutinizes gender changes in Algerian mythological narratives using two main methods ‘Charter myth’ and ‘Mythodology’. On the one hand, it attempts to uncover the sociological mechanisms and bias which may determine individuals’ reality. Per contra, it focuses on mythological functions, and how they affect individuals’ roles and statuses in their context. Thence, this work is divided into two sections. The first section consists of three interrelated chapters, while section two includes a separate didactic chapter, which in turnfocuses onlearners and teachers’ attitudes toward the implementations of myths in EFL classrooms.ChapterOne represents thegrandiose theoretical debate.It deals with previous and contemporary theories, debates and issues in relation to mythical studies. It also deals with mythical approaches, functions, and language in popular mythologies, such as ‘Greek mythology’.Chapter Two exposesa mixture of qualitative and quantitative part, and focuses on the various genderdimensions in Algerian mythology. Moreover, it constitutes of ‘Profiling Informants’, corpus collection, and extends to a‘Typology of Characters’. Chapter Three evinces the quantitative part of this work. Thus, it mentions the methodology and the assessment of gender empowerments from different angles.It also describes how functions determine the type of the narrative in terms of empowerments and bias.Accordingly, it attempts to summarize the sociological and the functional characteristics of the various Algerian narratives.Chapter Four focuses on the fourth function of mythology or what Campbell (1986) labeled as ‘Educational mythology’. In this sense, it pondersmythological implications in the Algerian EFL classroom.Partially, it tries toassess learners and teachers’ attitudes when usingmythical narrativeswith multiple EFL modules including the module of Gender studies.This work unfolds to project various intricacies of gender changes in Algerian myths.It goes beyond the classical model of Campbell(1986) to set new boundaries of functions distinguishing the Algerian narratives as a perpetualdiscourse of conflict and power in both oratory and prosaiccontexts